


Chain

by Guede



Category: GoldenEye (1995)
Genre: Bitterness, Double Agents, Drabble Collection, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Partner Betrayal, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Revenge, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:35:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27808447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: Vignettes from an arc of a relationship. What the nature of that relationship was is up for debate.
Relationships: James Bond/Alec Trevelyan
Kudos: 10





	1. Iron

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written and posted to LiveJournal in 2004.

_One day you may touch what’s wrong—  
The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.  
Till then your smiles are found money._  
\--From “For a Fatherless Son,” Sylvia Plath

***

They kept the files in tall cabinets of enameled steel, slightly rusted at the edges but nevertheless capable of swallowing entire classes. The locks were set into small ovals at the top right corner of each, about six inches above Alec’s head.

He was small for his age, but he’d learned enough tricks that no one called him on it. But that fact did make him wonder. More so when coupled with a few strange dreams, and some faint scars that no one at the school had managed to adequately explain. He could have gotten them in an accident when he was too young to remember. When his parents had him, and that was another thing: he didn’t have tombstones. All but the poorest boys knew where their parents were buried, or had a plaque, or had something to mark the earth. Alec didn’t. Curious, really, when he was supposed to be from gentlefolk.

But he wasn’t there to investigate those mysteries, which hadn’t grown any larger than a faint disturbance in the ripples of his mind. He was there to fix his Russian scores. Honestly, Pickworth had no idea what he was talking about with grammar, and just because Alec had publicly corrected him once—

_Click_.

A silent thanks to James for being such an incorrigible thief, and such a ready teacher, and Alec was quietly stepping off the chair he’d borrowed for a stool. He cracked open the drawer for his form and began to run his fingers down the file tabs. They flicked over his fingertips, like rain pattering on the window. Then he hissed and jerked back.

Papercut, damn it. Even though no one was around, Alec still blushed a little at thinking of a curse word. But it did hurt. He stuck his finger in his mouth and, sucking thoughtfully on it, leaned back over to examine the vicious manila tabs.

The culprit actually turned out to be a corner of stiff white stationery that poked out of his file. He tugged it out and found a neatly folded letter, inscribed with both English and Cyrillic. The foreign words were jagged, with little hairline streaks of black stabbing out from each letter as if they had been written in a hurry. Unfortunately, he couldn’t yet read more than one word in five, and the time was drawing near to bed patrol. He needed to leave, but he also wanted to know what the letter said. Especially when he glimpsed the words “mother” and “father” in Russian near the bottom.

As he glanced anxiously at the clock on the nearest desk, he carefully extracted a sheet of paper and a pen from its cluttered drawer. Alec quickly copied down the letter and altered his grades, then replaced everything the way he had found it and hurried off to bed, the copy tucked securely in his pocket.

He was late, and it was going to be tight to slip into bed without being seen, but he was still smiling. Two birds taken in one go. It had been a good night’s work.


	2. Chapter 2

_I am sending back the key  
that let me into bluebeard’s study;  
because he would make love to me_  
\--From “Bluebeard,” Sylvia Plath

***

It defied logic. The farther Alec grew from his parents’ slaughter, the better he remembered them.

Of course, his brutally thorough pursuit of that part of Russian history helped a great deal. Sometimes a picture in some yellowed reference book would trigger a memory, or a word spoken by the Russian professor, dropped into the classroom like a lodestone that inevitably found its way to Alec. He began to dream whole sequences of his life before. At first, in black and white, but later, color gradually dripped in to flesh out the flickering horrors.

It was much easier than he thought to keep his discovery secret. The letter with its screaming voices was muffled in the space between mattress and bedboards. A well-placed smile, used to gull professors and susceptible shopkeepers, could be effortlessly turned upon his mentors, his friends. Even James, to a point. But then, James was developing his own façade. Alec and he had an unspoken pact not to discuss the issue and simply to accept it as a necessary part of their friendship, but sometimes Alec wondered whether that agreement was less temporary expedience and more…something else.

They were beginning to notice girls now, but Alec was also noticing James. Black hair, changeable blue eyes, and that one grin he reserved solely for Alec. The one that always brought up an answering smirk, no matter what Alec had been thinking over before. And once in a while, when he was looking at James, he thought the other boy was looking back.

That was the difficult part. Even though Alec couldn’t decide exactly what James was to him, he was certain that it wasn’t simple friendship. And he was starting to realize how that might interfere with the strands of red and silver that were daily growing from the faded words of his parents, weaving their way across the recesses of his mind. The final decision wouldn’t come for a long, long time—he knew patience was of utmost importance—but it would come. He didn’t want to make it.

The gate rattled, jolting Alec out of his thoughts, and James’ rosy-cheeked face puffed into view. “Come on, Trevelyan. Time to go.”

Thrown off by his fatigue, James’ hand clapped onto Alec’s neck instead of his shoulder. It stayed there, warm and beckoning, before lifting off to grab his elbow and drag him off the bench into the sunny day.

Things could wait. He needed the time to make himself ready, at any rate. Until then—he had to fulfill his role on Shakespeare’s stage. “All right,” Alec laughed, free and amused. “I’m coming.”


	3. Chapter 3

_I made a fire; being tired  
Of the white fists of old  
Letters and their death rattle  
When I came too close to the wastebasket  
What did they know that I didn’t?_  
\--From “Burning the Letters,” Sylvia Plath

***

Alec was happy. Here, in the same land that had bucked off his parents into Stalin’s waiting jaws. Here, among the same people that had blithely let their government pick and discard entire populations as it pleased. Here, amid the shades and half-obscured expressions of nonchalance.

He was sitting on his bed, gingerly holding the many-times read letter, and he wanted to rip it up. Take his contraband lighter to the corner and let it eat into fluffy soft ashes. The words still howled, but he’d lived so long with that—and he preferred the false life he’d built for himself. It was easy, yet he could turn it upside-down in a moment if he needed adventure. It wasn’t soft, it wasn’t simple, but it was fulfilling. And after all, did it really matter? Everything was in the frosty, yellowed past.

He stared at the words for another moment, then angrily jerked the lighter from his pocket and slashed glowing orange across the paper, right where his parents had scrawled their names. The paper caught much faster than he had expected, and he hurriedly tossed it into his wastebasket, which flamed up like a funeral pyre.

“Damn, damn…where’s the pitcher…” Alec had forgotten about the crumpled wads already in there. He cast about for some way to extinguish the fire, only to turn into a full pail of water.

His eyes and nose were stinging, and his soaked clothes felt like they were crawling off his body. Somewhere behind him, the last flame hissed to its death.

James was lounging in the door, insolently grinning as usual as he swung the bucket from two fingers. “Alec, Alec, Alec. I come here to set up a surprise for you, and what do I find? Arson. Fine son of the Empire you are.”

An expression that had always grated at Alec, but coming from James, the bite was slightly dampened. He forced a smile and pointedly wrung out his sleeves at the other boy, who threw up an arm and cursed. “I’ll thank you to take your knight-in-shining-armor act to more appreciative audiences, Bond. Or has Cecilia dropped you already?”

“Cecilia, like all the other girls in this prison, lacks certain necessary qualities for serious pursuit,” James answered dryly as he set down the pail and began to help strip the wet clothing from Alec. His hands were very warm, and it seemed odd that their heat alone shouldn’t cause the water to sizzle off the fabric. And his eyes were particularly bright today, though that most likely was the light—

\--his lips were surprisingly gentle, and sweet as honeyed milk.

When they parted, Alec found he was holding onto James’ shoulders because his ankles were wobbling. James had the strangest look on his face, almost distant, and Alec would have commented if he wasn’t certain that his own face betrayed equal unsteadiness. “I can’t promise you anything,” he whispered, wishing someone would give him a hand. Or an explanation. Or a reason.

Blue eyes snapped back to lazy attention. “That’s all right. I wasn’t planning to ask.” Quieter grin now, which briefly banished the cold of Alec losing his grip without a safety line. “Not when everyone else wants everything.”

“Yes.” Alec laid his head against James’ shoulder and stared at the faint black smudges on his fingers. Ink from the letter. He thought he could feel it seeping into his blood and turning it as dark and hard as frozen soil.


	4. Chapter 4

_I dream of someone else entirely  
And he, for this subversion,  
Hurts me, he  
With his armor of fakery,_  
\--From “The Jailer,” Sylvia Plath

***

“We’re in, you realize.” James grinned again and thrust his glass high in the air. Pale yellow champagne slopped over its edges, sprinkling pearls all over the two of them. He set down the glass and rolled over to face Alec. “We’re in.”

“Yes. Merry Olde England’s decided we’re good enough for her elite.” Alec sounded bitter, even through his mouthful of effervescence. He swallowed the prickles down and ignored the sharp bursts against his soft palate. There was another letter in his pocket. At the very bottom, the starkly plain script of “Major Ourumov” carved deep grooves into the paper.

He hadn’t wasted his time on those piecework testing missions. Wrapped everything up and built a network of operatives on the side. He’d told himself it was so he could be certain on whom he could rely, in the future when he was sent back to Russia. Rus’. As beautiful and hard and fatal as the fragments of his childhood had told him. He’d found where they had shot his parents, and then where they had slaughtered the rest of his people. A bit of soil from both places now reposed in his bedroom drawer, right next to the bottle cork from his and James’ celebration of first getting into MI6.

“Alec?” James had sobered, and was now staring curiously at him. Gaze unconsciously frosting with distance, but that was how they had been taught, after all. Objective examination of the situation.

Alec had a good berth here. All the creature comforts—but none of the spiritual ones. He couldn’t shake the blood from his veins, or reverse the Bible and change it to pure, harmless water. He couldn’t shake the knowledge that if the British government was willing to lie to him about his past, then they would be more than happy to lie about his future.

And he’d been made to survive. “James. Don’t you worry at all about what they don’t tell us?”

“We’re on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.” Shrug that bumped Alec’s glass aside as the other man crawled closer and pushed his face into Alec’s neck. Lips nipped teasingly at his ear and throat. “It makes perfect sense to me.”

Alec closed his eyes and watched the breaking reel of memory flicker indelible images over the insides of his eyelids. “Do it for England, then.”

Smile, careless and blind, pressed into his skin. Its heat scorched him, but not nearly deep enough. “Exactly. For England, 006.”


	5. Chapter 5

_A gray wall now, clawed and bloody.  
Is there no way out of the mind?  
Steps at my back spiral into a well._  
\--From “Apprehensions,” Sylvia Plath

***

Concrete was a sharp, brutal surface. Even with layers of combat clothing between the wall and his back, Alec could still feel the bloody scrapes ripping into his skin. The cold quickly froze the pain to his flesh, readying it to be rasped away by the next thrust.

James was in a mood tonight. Snappish and black beneath his cool slickness, taking chances where there were none, and ignoring every woman in sight. Alec would normally be happy at the last one, but he suspected that Bond’s focus had, in fact, nothing to do with him. Something about the way James kept looking away from Alec’s face, the way James’ nails bit deep into Alec’s thighs, but didn’t bother to move. As if they’d been rooted into place.

He brushed his lips over Alec’s neck every so often, like following a pattern. Tongue, mouth, teeth. And when Alec tried to strike some spark of recognition from the cold flint, rake his fingers down James’ back—nothing came except a hiss and a slam. Air driven out of Alec as the blood soaked through his clothes. His wrists were wrenched up over his head so he could either fall or clench his legs about James’ waist. Which he did, staring at the breath fogging up the air between his wild panting and bluestone eyes.

They never seemed to blink. Like a mirror, reflecting ice and clotted blood and the scattered dead. Alec felt the old divide rise up again, cracking deeper and deeper. Crevasse now, going from the center of the earth to the top of his heart. The air thickened in his throat, and for a moment he thought he was drowning.

But then the surface broke open and let Alec through so he could stare at the vast, unending nothingness around him.

It hadn’t been his name. After all these years—

From his blood, the ancient call came. Beckoning only to him, depending only on him. And this time, he wholeheartedly answered.


	6. Chapter 6

_and by that glare, my love will see  
how I am still  
blazing in my golden hell._  
\--From “To a Jilted Lover,” Sylvia Plath

***

For once, something howled down the voices of the dead. His scars went deeper than the side of his face, deeper than his blood or bones or heart. They twisted every part of him, and made him want to scream.

Ourumov could’ve decided to betray Alec as well. The anesthesia in the dart might have been too strong. And Alec would have died, right there, in front of James. Even though it had all gone as it should—

\--except for the fire and fury—

\--he still had died for Bond. James had made sure of that, and then he hadn’t even bothered to return the favor. Handsome, handsome James with his black hair and blue eyes and easygoing cynicism. So that was how 007 valued their years together. And Alec had thought that he was the only liar in their relationship.

Fair’s fair, though. 006 had left his pathetic remains behind, and only Janus remained to animate the cold corpse. He would go to Russia and play his motherland for all the shiny black steel she could produce from her frozen womb, and then he would go to Cuba and plant his own seeds of the end. The inevitable finish toward which he’d been walking since childhood. A trench with walls that had only grown higher, and no way to escape. No offers, either, and now he had adapted to his surroundings. Learned to thrive. Revenge was his world now, and it would brook no competitors.

“Goodbye, then.” Alec smoked the last of his cigarette and tossed the ashes to the winds.


	7. Chapter 7

_Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:  
Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,  
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?_  
\--From “Conversation Among the Ruins,” Sylvia Plath

***

Neither of them had ever known the other, and they’d both known each other too well. It was a paradox of grandly tragic proportions. James hated paradoxes.

The world was gray, and decisions were black-and-white. It was one or the other, because to see both, to _think_ both, meant that action hesitated and failed. James hated failure, too, so he had made his choice long ago.

He wondered when Alec had made his. Had it really been decided for all his friend’s life? Had there ever been a time when he’d known the real Trevelyan, and not just the placeholder for the vengeful Cossack? Had—James bit down on his wistfulness—had there ever been a chance of Alec staying with him?

And even if there had been, would he have noticed it?

So many questions, so many possible answers that it hurt him to think of them all. James angrily kicked at the grass and the dirt, narrowly missing the iron gate. It wouldn’t do to disturb the next generation of orphans, after all. They might be distracted and lose their ways, never to find them again.

All James wanted to know was whether Alec had loved him. Ever. Hell—whether Janus had loved him, as it seemed that Janus had been just as much of their childhood as summer kisses and schoolyard pranks, as nighttime capers and daytime struggles. As England.

England.

James looked down at the few perfect blooms he’d brought with him, feeling the scratch of their stems and remembering the smooth way the leather boot had deliberately fallen from his hand. “Well, we’re even, Alec. Betrayal to betrayal, death to death. Because I did die for you.”

He put down the flowers by the corner of the gate and walked off into the fog.


End file.
